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Monday, 23 January 2017

The Cruise of Naromis. August in the Baltic 1939 By G.A.Jones

Every now and then a book pops up out of
nowhere and grabs you by the throat. Not in a brash or aggressive way, but by
sneaking under your skin and eyebrows and being hard to put down or ignore.

The Cruise of the Naromis is one of these.
It came to light in a fairytale way when Julia Jones, the author and publisher,
took a long hard look at some papers left many years before by her father
George, which turned out to be an almost casual account of a motor boat trip undertaken
in the very month before World War II became a reality rather than a lurking
fear.

George and his four friends, all carefree
and middle-class, joined the RNVSR – a sort of amateur navy for small boat
freaks – and took a ‘pleasure trip’ up the Kiel Canal to the Baltic Sea,
fraternizing happily with men who very shortly became England’s sworn enemies.

Along the canal through Germany, school
children waved happily at them, and German-speaking young men drank with them
like traditional brothers of the sea. And all the time Hitler and Churchill
were making their dreadful preparations.

Julia’s father gives a peculiarly specific
picture of a certain type of young man, in a certain era coming to an abrupt
and catastrophic end. His companions tended towards classic English nicknames –
he was ‘Honest George’ and there were also ‘Skip’ and ‘Fattie’ – and classic
English attitudes. Their boat was also of that ilk: built of wood on the
Norfolk Broads, with two diesel engines and a full suit of sails. Think Arthur
Ransome, think Captain Flint.

Think, as they did, lovely, dreamy,
flaxen-haired German damsels drinking tons of German beer and elegantly smoking
cigarettes. Enough to make a young man’s heart ache or break.

Nothing much happens to them on the trip –
thank God – but they take a lot of photographs, which they (perhaps
disingenuously) see as pretty insignificant. Oh yes, of shipping in the Kiel
Canal the week before the war breaks out. They were possibly lucky to end up
alive, who knows?

But they did, thank heaven, and because of
that we have Julia Jones and the rest of George’s family. Like this book, worth
cherishing.